The worship wars

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:00

Foreign. Hey, welcome, everyone, to our unfiltered podcast. My name is Lee Stevenson, and we're here having real conversations about church planning.

My co host here, Danny Parmalee. Say hi, man.

Danny Parmelee: 00:00:20

How's everyone doing?

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:22

I didn't know where you were going with that. Howdy. Or whatever it was. But, hey, we're so glad you tuned in. Today we're going to have conversations about all things worship.

You know, it's a key factor in a church plan is what do we do with worship, how do we develop worship, who leads our worship? How do you get a culture of worship developed among your people? This may actually be more of a ongoing podcast.

I will add a couple different parts to this, but these are challenging things to do is, hey, we know this is an important part of our Sunday experience. We don't have a whole lot of money. What is a reasonable expectation? And so what do we do with that? But I thought, Danny, it'd be fun to.

Let's just start with maybe one or two of our most awkward experiences of watching worship happen at a local church.

Danny Parmelee: 00:01:18

Okay, so. Well, what I would say is that we didn't have a lot of money. We were desperate.

I played a little bit of bass in a high school band, and so I was actually part of the. So one of the most awkward times is when I had to play in the worship team.

Lee Stephenson: 00:01:34

I just refused to do that.

Danny Parmelee: 00:01:36

Our worship leader fired me. So I only had one week that I ever led worship, and then two weeks after that, he had to be at a wedding and we had nobody to lead worship.

So we literally put David Crowder CD in a boombox and press play, and that was our worship. This is. This is post launch, Lee.

Lee Stephenson: 00:01:55

Wow.

Danny Parmelee: 00:01:57

So talk about some rough times.

Lee Stephenson: 00:01:59

How many people were coming to the church at that point?

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:01

You know what, Maybe the better question is many people came back the next week. But we, so we had launched with, you know, 150 people. I think we were down to like 60 or something like that.

And it was summertime and there was, you know, everyone had weddings and, and things to go to. And I mean, we just, we. It was so wrong.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:22

So basically you're telling people there's hope. It could be really bad.

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:26

So these were one of those times church can make it through it, where Emily thought for. For sure I was coming home to say, you know what, we gave it our best try, but time for you to get a real job, so.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:35

Oh, that's. That's fantastic. How about you, man? I. I've been in some awkward Situations. One time, I remember visiting a church, and I.

I didn't even know anything about them. Stepped in. Worship service was kind of more traditional stylistically than even what I expected. And then they did.

They got to that point of the service, and you've been in a more traditional experience, as you know what I'm talking about, where they had a special number, and this guy came up, and he was an old guy, almost needed help getting up the stairs, sits down in a chair. I'm like, huh, this is interesting.

And he reaches in his back pocket and pulls two spoons out, and literally the music comes on, and he starts playing the spoons on the stage for the special music. So that was fairly awkward. But I also went, and I want to leverage this.

I remember going to a church plant a number of years ago, and it seemed like it was the very first Sunday.

They got a smoke machine, and they didn't know necessarily how to use it, how to make sure it lended itself to the worship experience in the correct way.

And I can remember the worship team was up there, and they were rocking out, and all of a sudden the smoke machine started on, and smoke started pouring out between the legs of the worship leader, and it was just flying into the room, and there was no rhyme or reason. It was like there was a guy in the back room just laughing, hitting the button whenever he felt like he wanted to hit the button.

Which tells me, like, guys, we have aspirations of where we want to get.

You got to make sure that you're actually at that level before you begin to introduce these different elements into the worship experience, because it can actually backfire on you if you don't use it correctly. For instance, the example I just gave, it can actually turn people away.

Danny Parmelee: 00:04:18

Yeah. And even as we discuss this, we understand that worship comes with tons of opinions and controversy. So we said, this is unfiltered.

Lee and I, we may even disagree on some things, but we just want to at least have some conversation about it, because ultimately, as the church planter, you are the worship leader. You are going to set the direction. You are going to be making some of the decisions.

You're going to be, you know, recruiting the volunteers or paying that first worship leader. And so you essentially are the worship leader. And so to think through even some of. Kind of the.

Maybe it's even the deeper theological questions type of thing, but that's what we want to have a conversation about.

Lee Stephenson: 00:05:00

Yeah. So what. What did you guys do once you got past the boombox stage? Yeah. Like, where did you Find a worship guy. How did you work with that guy?

How did you train him? Did he stay your worship guy long term? Walk me through some of those things, Danny.

Danny Parmelee: 00:05:16

Yeah, so maybe our situation is unique in this, but I had a friend that we did minist together in college in Campus Crusade for Christ. And he was the worship guy and I was the MC and kind of leader of it.

And so when God had called us to plant a church, I invited him to be part of it and he did. He moved to Milwaukee and help plant the church. And in the beginning, paid, not paid. I was just going to say we had no money.

And so it was completely volunteer. So he was volunteer as a lead and he would any Sunday that he could. He was leading worship, slowly building a team.

But if he was gone, it was either a boombox or he would work to try to find someone that would fit and fill that position.

Which again, when you don't have a lot of resources, that's difficult because most musicians, lead worship leaders, are going to require some sort of money. We just didn't have that. Mike is still the worship pastor at Epicost. Really, so.

Lee Stephenson: 00:06:21

So he grew through all the years.

Danny Parmelee: 00:06:23

He stayed through all of it. And I just, I owe so much to him.

His, his loyalty, all of the mistakes I made, all of the hard times, all that he stuck through and through is super gifted. Not, not just as a musician and as a worship leader, but as someone who builds teams. And that was something that was really important.

And to understand that eventually, and maybe it's not your first person, may person just is a worship leader, but eventually you want someone who just doesn't want to be at the front of the stage and singing their songs. But you want someone who does develop teams and develop other worship leaders.

Lee Stephenson: 00:07:04

Yeah, love it, Love it. Yeah.

For us, even early on, the first church plant we did, I had a group of guys and a couple girls that were in our college ministry at the time that were just really gifted musicians. And I just approached them, said, hey, we're going to start a church. I'd love for you guys to come and lead us in worship.

Early on, again, not paid, all volunteer, and it took a lot of work to figure out the equipment. Those are challenges as well as like, do we pay for in ear monitors right off the bat or do we put on the floor monitors?

Those were conversations that we were having to have. And they did fantastic through our grand opening and even beyond our grand opening.

Eventually one of them we were like, we need to figure out who's the leader who do I coordinate with to make sure the services are actually, you know, we're moving things forward, making sure that they're getting their adequate practice time. And so we ended up with kind of appointing a leader that would kind of take charge and be my main point of conversation.

Eventually, a couple months down the road, we ended up paying him just a very basic stipend, just to say thank you. We just didn't have a whole lot of money. And honestly, he led us for a long time.

Led us to probably to the point we were about 350 people and did movie theater worship, did school worship, even when we made the transition to our building for a little while. But there also came a season in his own life personally.

But even for us as a church, we felt like his capacity level at this point was probably reached. And we then had to begin to navigate how do we transition, because we were incredibly thankful.

We wouldn't have been the church that we were without him and the team that had been developed and came with us. But we needed somebody that could take us to the next level of developing other people within our bounds.

And so it was about that point when we hit 350 that we actually went and got a full time worship leader to help us develop the culture of worship within our church.

Danny Parmelee: 00:09:12

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. With Michael, we did, I think, man, probably first couple years, total volunteer.

He was working full time at Hal Leonard, a music publishing company. And so he was basically volunteering all of his time. And then we started to.

We had a little bit more money, so we were giving them maybe a 300 or $500 kind of stipend type of thing. And then there was an area church that, that came and said, hey, we would like to interview Mike for our worship leader position.

I'm thinking, oh my goodness.

And, and not that we were forced into it, but for me it was just kind of that realization where it's like he was such a significant part of the church and what it allowed us to do is really to buy his time full time. So transition into that. For people who aren't as maybe fortunate that they have these relationships, maybe they're going to a completely new area.

What are some ideas to find a worship leader? Do you pay? Do you not. How do you.

How do you figure out if they're even match stylistically, if they're theologically like all of those different things?

Lee Stephenson: 00:10:22

Great, great questions. It's gonna. It takes hard work. I don't know how else to put it. You got A network, network, network.

And so leverage every network that you can find or that you're connected with. College campuses are a great place to look.

You know, whether or not you have a Christian college, you can probably find somebody that's actually fairly gifted in the area, passionate about worship, that could help you guys get going. Maybe they have a few friends even at the college campus that come and play and fill in instrumentally. There are.

You can even look at like campus ministries, like accrue or navigators, different things at a state school and find if they have people that would be able to come and fill. And you're probably going to have to pay something and, you know, but it doesn't have to be a lot.

So it could be $50 or $100 a week to at least get you up and going. Unless you have a real tight relationship with somebody and able to leverage, you know, relational equity to bring them in.

Honestly, you can find musicians even through Craigslist. And so if you can find the point person that can have key conversations and begin to help fill those.

I'm a big believer that don't sacrifice the quality just to have a full team on the stage. Sometimes less is more.

And so if you have a really good leader that can just lead with a guitar, let them lead with a guitar, and then find the components that work well with the kind of the direction that you want to go and build to where you need to be. Sometimes we feel like we need a full band, we need a keyboard, we need a drummer. We need this, we need this, we need this. And yes, that's ideal.

But you have to remember, like, this is a startup. Like, what is good enough right now at the stage of our church?

Danny Parmelee: 00:12:12

Yeah, I think that the worship leader is such a key partnership. This is one to pray and fast and just put a lot of time and energy to have that person beyond beyond.

Lee Stephenson: 00:12:25

And I would encourage you, like, once you have that person on the team, like, spend a lot of time with them, you know, you want to make sure, because they're the ones sharing the stage with you. Like, there's a good rapport, there's good chemistry. If there isn't, it will show when you guys both take the stage.

And so you want to make sure that there's a good flow, good level of respect going both directions.

Danny Parmelee: 00:12:45

So that is a perfect.

Tee up for a question that's been kind of in my mind as you've been talking church plant in the beginning, how much input did you have on the worship set and songs and Just how much?

Lee Stephenson: 00:13:02

Quite a bit. Yeah.

Danny Parmelee: 00:13:03

And then did that change later on? And what changed or why? Or would you say that even as the church grew, you still were heavy either on input and or feedback?

Lee Stephenson: 00:13:17

Yeah, early on it was quite a bit, but the way I did it was I had them preload their song choice two weeks ahead of what they felt like they were going to do. I made sure they understood sermon wise where I was going, kind of the feel of the service that I felt like we needed to have.

And then I went through those songs and checked the order. We got to where it was. It was pretty much like this is the same order every single week, unless it was a special weekend.

And special weekend would be by order.

Danny Parmelee: 00:13:51

You mean order of service, order of three songs, announcement.

Lee Stephenson: 00:13:54

Exactly, exactly. And so that did make it really easy. I think there is sometimes this pressure, like we have to be so creative every single week in and week out.

And the reality is you're going to wear yourself out, your team out and your people, if that's the way you're trying to live. And so we, what we ended up doing was the creativity came out on special weekends.

So maybe it was a fall kickback, you know, kickoff, maybe it was Christmas Eve, Easter, those type of things. And minimizing those more creative weekends actually made it seem it was twice as more creative than it actually was.

Even stage design, we minimized how often we changed the stage design to maybe twice a year, maybe at the most three times a year, just just to kind of simplify the pressure that that was out there. But there were times, like I said and go, I don't like that song. And this is why.

And I explained theologically where I felt like that song is just off. And so I said, we're not ever going to sing that song, so just take it off. You know.

And occasionally there was a song where I may missed it in the lyrics, but on Sunday morning, like, we're singing this song and I'm watching how people engage the song. Like, no, that's not us. Like that culturally doesn't fit our church or, you know, we really wanted to connect with men.

I'm like, that song like totally alienates every man in the service. And so, like, get rid of that song. We're never going to sing that song again.

But there was a high level of trust with me and the team at that point to recognize, like, if, you know, this is, this is a big deal at times. And they, they responded very well.

Danny Parmelee: 00:15:33

Yeah, that's great.

Lee Stephenson: 00:15:34

Yeah. What did you guys Do.

Danny Parmelee: 00:15:36

Yeah, I was, I was pretty involved. Part of that's maybe just my own control freak nature.

But in the beginning, with Mike being full time, we had less prep in the beginning and it was actually kind of neat sometimes to see how God would orchestrate like man, that actually fit well with a message. And because we had relationships, I mean.

Lee Stephenson: 00:15:57

The Holy Spirit did what the Holy Spirit does.

Danny Parmelee: 00:15:59

Yes. And so we had that relational chemistry. So that allowed.

And of course, you know, we would constantly just be, you know, be talking kind of about worship, you know, culture things without knowing that we were having those. But we would talk about what are we trying to accomplish during worship, what do we, what do we want to do?

What are creative elements but what then becomes distracting type of thing? What.

How do you usually respond to people, People when they say when there's that question of like, how, you know, like, well, that just, that seems like performance. Maybe my tone gave me away because I love to talk about that so much or I don't know if maybe it's an open ended question.

What do you, what do you think the role of performance should play in worship?

Lee Stephenson: 00:16:57

Great question. And it's going to come.

And why this is, I think an important conversation is I was naive going into our first service and I thought, we're a church plant, we're never going to have worship wars. And I couldn't have been further from the truth. Like it, I think week two, it started up and I'm like, what is going on?

You know, for me personally, I feel like whatever I do and put my name on, I know I'm going to do my best. I want to exhaust every opportunity and that doesn't matter.

I mean, if I'm washing my car to mowing my yard, like I'm always going to put my best foot forward.

I think I feel double pressure in that, in a pastoral role of kind of going like we have an opportunity to lead our people into the presence of Christ. Like heaven is going to be spectacular.

Anytime I see that the angels showed up and are worshiping the Lord, like it is a performance and there's an element even as you look through the Old Testament, like there is a level of excellence when it comes to how the worship experience happened and the detail that they put forth to even what the priests wore in the tabernacle, like they were spelled out with incredible detail.

And so that tells me like it is a way for us to show an offering to the Lord of like, I'm not coming to you with something I have not prepared and teaching our people to prepare their hearts. And like, God is worth these things. Now, I don't think that means we have to wear suits and we don't like those things.

I think there's important to be culturally relevant. But there is a fine line, and we've got to learn how to live in that tension as pastors between, are we fully performance driven?

Are we worship driven? And that was a line I was okay to live in.

There would be people that would come in and look at what we did and go, man, you guys are all about the show. You're all about the performance. And never gets a chance to actually get to know us in our heart. That was driving who we were and what we did.

And I would always lean on the fact that I think our hearts were pure first. But we wanted to do what we did on a Sunday morning with a level of excellence because our culture demands it.

They go to a concert or they watch the MTV Awards on tv. There is a high caliber of excellence on what they're used to and what they expect.

Just in general, we're not going to be ever going to be able to compete with that. And our goal is not to compete with that. But our goal is to have an excellent experience for people that come in.

Because if it's not excellent, people don't invite people to average. And so I want my message to be clear. I want it to be concise. I want it to have a point. I want to lead people somewhere.

Same thing's true about our worship experience. We want people to have fun. We want people to celebrate. We want them to connect emotionally with who God is as well.

And we want to prepare them for that message that they're going to receive. To not do that with a certain level of excellence is so countercultural that people will not engage.

They won't invite their friends or their neighbors to come to the experience that they experience every weekend. So that's kind of where I'm at. What about for you, Danny?

Danny Parmelee: 00:20:37

Yeah, for me, I guess I get annoyed somewhat with the question, because every single worship service has an element of performance. So people are saying, well, we just do hymns because we don't want to be like one of those performancers. Like, you wear robes.

You know, it's kind of like the choice of robes. Or if you don't want to do any performance, then don't even sing the song. Then you get to chanting. But even you boil it down to chips.

So it's really to the degree. And I think, you know, going off of what you said, it's about leading people towards worship.

Can that go in a direction where it's about the people on the stage or trying so hard, maybe trying too hard, to just match culture? It's not really bringing people into the presence of God. Yes, absolutely.

But I think everyone has to be careful of saying this is performance, and this is not. Because most pastors and church planters say this is. We're not performance, and everybody else is performance.

And it's just too easy, I think, to kind of slip into that now. I do think it's good to ask those questions. Why do you do what you do on a regular basis? Is it helping?

Is it something that's distracting, or is it something that is helping to draw people towards worship? Absolutely. And that may look different.

Lee Stephenson: 00:21:55

And I would encourage, like, everybody, evaluate your worship experience every weekend. But when I talk about evaluate, ask some hard questions. Were people deeply led into worship, yes or no? If not, why? What got in the way? Ask yourself.

Was technology an enhancement or a distraction?

Danny Parmelee: 00:22:17

That's a good one.

Lee Stephenson: 00:22:19

So that way you're constantly filtering and helping align your heart as to being in the right direction.

Danny Parmelee: 00:22:25

That's good.

Lee Stephenson: 00:22:27

Well, we're even in this new church plant, we're approaching some things on the worship scale a little differently.

We're actually even in the launch phase, writing our own music, knowing that God works in every church uniquely and that there's a specific call and a specific culture and things that God is wanting to do in this church, in this community that's different from what he may be doing in a church in Milwaukee or in Seattle or something of that sort. And we love singing Hillsong, we love singing elevation music and some of those different things. And they have a place and a role.

But at the same time, we want to birth some music and worship experience that is unique to us and what God is wanting to do in our hearts and our people, in our community.

And so we've been very intentional over the last couple months of actually beginning to write and with the hope to record because we want it to be a message and a testimony of what God is doing here among our people.

Danny Parmelee: 00:23:28

Yeah. And I feel probably, well, for a lot of church planters, there is that creative kind of bone in their body.

And that certainly for me, and I think it's a reflection of God's creativity.

So, again, it's living in that tension of reflecting the creativity and the excellence, drawing people into that awe without, again, making it about yourself.

Lee Stephenson: 00:23:51

Yeah.

Danny Parmelee: 00:23:51

You know, type of thing.

Lee Stephenson: 00:23:52

Love it. Love it. Well, guys, we will continue the conversation and worship conversations in the future. Thanks so much for being with us today.

This is unfiltered podcast. Real conversations. Until next time, guys. Keep it real.